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History of Semiotics HISTORY OF SEMIOTICS Andi Muhammad Syafri Idris Universitas Hasanuddin Semiotic awareness was initiated by Augustine (c.397AD) and Poinsot, then followed by John Locke, in 1690, and Charles Sanders Peirce, who discovered the categories of semiotics, realism and idealism (1867-1914). INTRODUCTION Literature is a medium which provide knowledge and information from the writer. Language is the source of literature and also the medium to communicate with others. Communication in daily activity especially in Indonesian tradition which include many expression and idioms in order to strengthen the tradition itself such as ‘maulid nabi’ which contains prayers to our prophet (Rahman, 2017). Based on Rahman’s research, there is a relation between language and literature. Rahman (2020) stated that literature is an identity which referred to ethno-literature. Ethno-literature is an oral form which maintained by the speaker through generations. Literature is a source of learning and entertainment for readers (Rahman, Amir P., & Tammasse, 2019). One of literary work that has interesting aspects and has important role in literary research is Shakespeare’s writing as Rahman & Weda (2019) in their research regarding linguistics deviation and rhetoric figures in Shakespeare’s selected plays. 1. The Ancient World and Augustine Augustine was the first to argue that the signum is a tool or means commonly used to carry out various types and levels of communication. This view was considered surprising in his day because in the philosophical world of Greece or ancient Rome, which was dominated by this philosophy, no single view of the sign was the same as we believe today. The root word "seme" is of course Greek, but in the Greek text itself the view of the sign is divided into two, namely between Semeion / Nature on the one hand and Symbol / Culture. Plato di Cratylus (c.385BC), as well as Aristotle in all of his works including Perihermenias [c.330BC: 16-20a; cf. Eco et al. 1986: 66-68], and Boethius [esp. inter 511-513AD] confirms the tendency of Augustine's opinion about the unity of signs (doktrina signorum). Apart from Augustine, there were also the Stoics, who in their debates with the Epicureans developed a fairly complete theory of signs but that only a fraction of their opponents had, especially Sextus Empiricus (c. 200). Eco, Lambertini, Marmo, and Tabarroni (1986: 65-66) said that Augustine was the first to put forward the term general semiotics, namely the science or general doctrine of signs. 2. The Latin World In the development of semiotic awareness, William of Ockham (i.1317- 1328), although rejecting logicians, accepted Augustine's definition that each sign is a link or vehicle to something immaterial, that is, the content identified by the sign which cannot be felt. William's objection to logicians stems from taking external signs such as words and signs and the inner way of knowing such as images and ideas as part of the perspective of the sign. The long-established rejection of the relationship between sign and perceived meaning occurred while Ockham was living in Paris and because of his introduction to the concept of signum naturale. Petrus d'Ailly (c. 1372) distinguished the internal way (signa formalia) and the external way of knowing (signa instrumentalia), whereas what is known and what is felt are shared by society. Williams (1985a: xxxiii) argues that the controversy in semiotics that began around the 17th century revolved around the question of whether signs only involve what can be felt. But according to William, it is more important to put thoughts and words into the perspective of the doctrine of the sign. 3. The Iberian Connection Dominicus Soto (1529, 1554) at the start of his studies in Paris disagreed with the relationship between the presence of a sign and its active function in experience with vehicles that can be perceived as a sign, raising questions about the dependence of objectivity when the sign functions. The function of a sign is limited to what can be seen and experienced directly as an object. (Williams, 1985). In general, from ancient times to the present, the sign is seen as a Janus mask (Janus mask), has two faces, and is relative to the cognitive powers of some organisms on the one hand and with the contents of the sign. on the other hand. Relativity is what causes a sign to become a sign. In this connection, signs can function from within the cognitive powers of an organism and signs that function to influence those forces from without. That difference questions the nature of relativity? John Poinsot answered that question in his book Treatise on Signs (1632a). The pre-semiotic or idealist realist paradigm fails to understand that ideas are signs before they become objects of our consciousness. In their view, a sign can only give access to the essence of something only to what it can convey. itself is unnatural in terms of the previous tradition and in what it anticipates. The decisive development in this regard was the privileged achievement of John Poinsot, a student with the Conimbricenses, and the successor, after a century, to Soto's own teaching position at the University of Alcalá de Henares. With a single stroke of genius resolving the controversies, since Boethius, over the interpretation of relative being in the categorial scheme of Aristotle, Poinsot (1632a 117/28-118/18, esp. 118/14-18, annotated in Deely 1985: 472-479) was able to provide semiotics with a unified object conveying the action of signs both in nature virtually and in experience actually, as at work at all three of the analytically distinguishable levels of conscious life (sensation, perception, intellection). By this same stroke he was also able to reconcile in the univocity of the object signified the profound difference between what is and what is not either present in experience here and now or present in physical nature at all (Poinsot 1632a: Book III). Poinsot was able to reduce to systematic unity Soto's ad hoc series of distinctions, as he put it in his first announcement of the work of his Treatise ("Lectori", 1631; p. 5 of the Deely 1985 edition), and thereby to complete the gestation in Latin philosophy of the first foundational treatise establishing the fundamental character of, and the ultimate simplicity of the standpoint determining, the issues that govern the unity and scope of the doctrine of signs. Unfortunately, because he so skillfully embedded his Tractatus de Signis within a massive and traditional Aristotelian cursus philosophiae naturalis, he unwittingly ensured its slippage into oblivion in the wake of Descartes' modern revolution. Three hundred and six years would pass between the original publication of Poinsot's Treatise on Signs and the first frail appearance of some of its leading ideas in late modern culture (Maritain 1937-1938, discussed in Deely 1986d). 4. The Place of John Locke Coincidentally, Poinsot achieved his Herculean labor of the centuries in the birth year of the man whose privilege it would be, while knowing nothing of Poinsot's work, to give the perspective so achieved what was to become its proper name. Thus, 1632 was both the year John Locke was born and the year that Poinsot's treatise on signs was published. The name-to-be for what both Locke and Poinsot and, later Peirce also, called "the doctrine of signs"—an expression of pregnant import in its own right, as Sebeok (1976a: ix) was first to notice (elaborated in Deely 1978a, 1982b, 1986b inter alia)—was proposed publicly fifty-eight years later, in 1690, in the five closing paragraphs (little more than the very last page) of Locke's Essay concerning Humane Understanding. The principal instigation that Locke himself wrote in reaction against, but along very different lines from what he would end by proposing for "semiotic", was the Cartesian attempt (1637, 1641) to claim for rational thought a complete separation from any dependency on sensory experience. The irony of the situation in this regard was that Locke's principal objections to Descartes were not at all furthered by the speculative course he set at the beginning and pursued through the body of his monumental Essay concerning Humane Understanding of 1690. Instead, he furthered the Cartesian revolution in spite of himself; deflected the brilliant suspicions of Berkeley (1732); fathered the cynical skepticism of Hume (1748);47 and laid the seeds of overthrow of his own work in concluding it with the suggestion that what is really needed is a complete reconsideration of "Ideas and Words, as the great Instruments of Knowledge" in the perspective that a doctrine of signs would make possible. The consideration of the means of knowing and communicating within the perspective of signifying, he presciently suggested, "would afford us another sort of Logick and Critick, than what we have hitherto been acquainted with". It was for this possible development that he proposed the name semiotic. The antinomy between the actual point of view adopted at the beginning for the Essay as a whole and the possible point of view proposed at its conclusion (Deely 1986a) is, for semiotic historiography, an object worthy of consideration in its own right. It remains that to Locke goes the privilege and power of the naming. If today we call the doctrine of signs "semiotic" and not "semiology", it is to the brief concluding chapter XX in the original edition of Locke's Essay that we must look for the reason—there, and to the influence this chapter exercised on the young American thinker, Charles Sanders Peirce, who read the Essay but made of its conclusion a substantial part of his philosophy and lifework from 1867 onward.
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